The worker-priests: care as a composition of love and solidarity

This article explores the moral lessons organization studies can draw from the worker-priest movement of the 1940s and 1950s. The first section gives an account of the worker-priests and their organization in France. The second section, drawing on the philosophy of Søren Kierkegaard, Emmanuel Levinas and Leonardo Boff, identifies in this organization a resonance of care that operates via four techniques: proximity; self-divestment; radical giving; and collective particularity. These techniques establish a synthesis between love and solidarity that aims at bringing justice into the world as care. The article concludes with a discussion of what this account might bring to a critical spirituality of organization that is centred on the precariousness of existence – and its demand for care.